The ways our free press has served the powers it was supposed to afflict range from the belabored (Judith Miller’s WMD “scoops” in the Times), to the grandiose (Tom Friedman’s op-ed manifestos for a new political species: the pro-war-if-it-works liberal), to the perverse (Christopher Hitchens’s flogging, in Slate, of a left-wing fifth column so much worse than the Bush-Cheney-Halliburton complex). My favorite editorial pledge of allegiance was a syndicated column by Kathleen Parker welcoming the ministrations of Bush’s domestic spies because, hey, she wasn’t conducting any phone business more controversial than making appointments to get her highlights done.

We have become such “good Americans” that we no longer have the moral imagination to picture what it might be like to be in a bureaucratic category that voids our human rights, be it “enemy combatant” or “illegal immigrant.” Thus, in the week before the election, hardly a ripple answered the latest decree from the Bush administration: Detainees held in CIA prisons were forbidden from telling their lawyers what methods of interrogation were used on them, presumably so they wouldn’t give away any of the top-secret torture methods that we don’t use. Cautiously, I look back on that as the crystallizing moment of Bushworld: tautological as a Gilbert and Sullivan libretto, absurd as a Marx Brothers movie, and scary as a Kafka novel.

From Nixon to Dubya’s current reign modern conservatives might be better termed Nazi-lite. You can go to work, do some shopping, and order a pizza – everyone has all the illusions of freedom absent the political foundations on which a sustainable democracy rests.

The tipster had read about the thefts and called police Sunday after seeing workers transporting boxes from various nut processors between a rental truck and the warehouse, Merced County Sheriff‘s Detective Vince Gallagher said.

Investigators suspect that the almonds in the warehouse were stolen from Central Valley orchards, and they are examining whether the importer was selling them to stores, Gallagher said.

Growers in California‘s Central Valley produce about 80 percent of the world‘s almonds.

They couldn’t break into a fruitcake factory and steal all the fruitcake so that millions of Americans could be spared having a rum soaked door-stop.